{"id":5834,"date":"2017-01-18T10:59:13","date_gmt":"2017-01-17T23:59:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.rch.org.au\/news\/?p=5834"},"modified":"2017-01-18T11:00:32","modified_gmt":"2017-01-18T00:00:32","slug":"from-slow-death-to-a-life-of-promise","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.rch.org.au\/news\/from-slow-death-to-a-life-of-promise\/","title":{"rendered":"From slow death to a life of promise"},"content":{"rendered":"

First published in the Herald Sun, 14 January 2017<\/em><\/p>\n

Words by Grant McArthur<\/em><\/p>\n

Ramalia Borges flew home last week with two new heart valves and a renewed chance at life she could barely imagine in her remote East Timor home.<\/p>\n

Suffering rheumatic heart disease, the 15-year-old\u2019s heart barely sustained her and she was lethargic and dizzy to the point of seeing two images of her mother standing in front of her.<\/p>\n

But, after being brought to Australia by the East Timor Heart Fund for an exhaustive operation at the Royal Children\u2019s Hospital, \u201cAlia\u201d now dreams of becoming a doctor herself.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey fixed my heart. I am very happy because I knew that my life was going to be saved,\u201d she said.<\/figure>\n
\"East
East Timor\u2019s Ramalia \u2018Alia\u2019 Borges, 15 at the Royal Children’s Hospital after heart surgery. Picture: Sarah Matray<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Alia and her mother, Octavia, made their way to the East Timor Heart Fund\u2019s clinic last March following a tough journey from their mountain hamlet. It was found that an untreated infection early in life had attacked both the mitral and aortic valves.<\/p>\n

In Australia the condition would have been overcome with simple monthly antibiotics, but it consigned Alia to slow death in the coming two years.<\/p>\n

The Melbourne-based charity began crowd-funding for the $20,000 needed to bring Alia to the specialised care of the RCH.<\/p>\n

When she arrived, Professor Yves d\u2019Udekem found Alia\u2019s ventricle was enlarged with vast amounts of blood flowing the wrong way into her heart.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou have to operate before the heart gets too weak, because if you wait too long then you don\u2019t have a full recovery of the heart muscle,\u201d Prof d\u2019Udekem said.<\/p>\n

Two days before Christmas Alia\u2019s heart was clamped off and stopped for more than three hours while Prof d\u2019Udekem used Alia\u2019s own tissue to rebuild and repair the valves.<\/p>\n

While the procedure typically improves patients\u2019 lives, it does not always have a perfect result, often leaving smaller amounts of blood continuing to flow the wrong way.<\/p>\n

But, in Alia\u2019s case, the result was stunning.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Read how cardiac surgery at the RCH is helping East Timor patient Ramalia<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":104,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8971,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5834","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-featured","category-in-the-news"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.rch.org.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5834","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.rch.org.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.rch.org.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.rch.org.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/104"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.rch.org.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5834"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.rch.org.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5834\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5841,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.rch.org.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5834\/revisions\/5841"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.rch.org.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5834"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.rch.org.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5834"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.rch.org.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5834"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}